Word: boughs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...greatest fear was "public exposure of personal inadequacy." While he often proclaimed his relish for combat, he seemed to dread it at the same time; it was as if defeat would mean, as it did for the King of the Wood in Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, a sentence of death. It was his efforts to prevent the exposure of his Administration's failings that ultimately undid...
...Mann's Venice as well as, say, Casanova's-where Jenkins and the other major characters have assembled for an international conference. For the moment they are living like kings in sinking palazzi, but Jenkins reflects that they are only temporary kings like those in The Golden Bough: marked, after their brief ascendancy, for death. By the end of the book that death proves to be literal for several; for others, it takes the symbolic form of loss of virility, humiliation or merely a return to everyday life...
...Constantine, foolish male, has apparently never read The Golden Bough. He keeps poking into the secrets of Cornwall Coombe until the full moon at harvest time. He is in deeper trouble than he knows. "They call it the Moon of No Repentance around here," says the local matriarch. "Come harvest, you take what there is - too late for repentance . . . there are some hereabouts who don't take kindly to a man who makes fun at our ways...
...setting for Michael Langham's staging of Oedipus the King seems less Thebes than a jungle clearing. The tribal-dancing choruses, shaking their amulets, mandalas and animal skins, are less out of Sophocles than The Golden Bough. When Oedipus (Len Cariou) makes his entrance, emerging from the palace portals as if they formed a monstrous womb, he is less the king of a Greek city-state than an archetypal Everyman in a loincloth...
Barth's trick is to bend the old Golden Bough into fairy tales about the ordinary daily reality of archetypes. So we find Perseus, the slayer of Medusa, bogged down in middle age and suffering from what might be called hero's block. "You saw how it was," he says to his mistress, a nymph. "The kids were grown and restless; Andromeda and I had become different people; our marriage was on the rocks. The kingdom took care of itself; my fame was sure enough-but I'd lost my shine with golden locks...